Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how young men in highland Odisha navigate contradictory social registers in an increasingly anomic context. In doing so they become analysts of contradiction in their own right.

Paper long abstract:

Perhaps everywhere human life involves contradiction between epistemological, organisational and spatiotemporal orders, but these contradictions are particularly marked in situations of rapid generational change. In the forested highlands of Kandhamal, Odisha, the livelihoods of Kutia Kondh families remain rooted in swidden cultivation and few in the older generations have any formal schooling. A generation of Kutia youth, meanwhile, have spent their formative years in state-run educational institutions, their horizons conditioned by much broader frames of the nation and party politics. This paper focuses on the situation of young, educated Kutia men as they navigate contradictions between new aspirations, opposing regimes of value, and historically rooted expectations. The paper focuses on two primary contradictions. The first is the mismatch between new aspirational horizons and the reality of life rooted in local agroecological conditions. The second is local attitudes towards communal buffalo sacrifices, which have a long political history in the region. Increasingly positioned as anachronisms by socially mobile individuals, these ritual sacrifices are also stages for new aesthetics of masculinity. Through the everyday work of navigating contradiction, young Kutia men ultimately become analysts of contradiction in their own right, reflexively engaging juxtaposed social orders in their daily lives.